About José Melo

With over 18 years of hands-on experience building software, I design resilient architectures and scalable infrastructure. I work where technology meets business strategy, focusing on long-term system health, risk management, and platform reliability.

Engineering Leadership

Throughout my career, I’ve found that my biggest impact comes from guiding teams through uncertainty and building alignment across engineering and product.

• Team Empowerment: I help engineers become independent problem solvers, creating a culture of ownership and trust. I often code alongside developers to share my experience and work through challenges together.
• Cross-Functional Direction: I lead cross-team projects and turn complex, ambiguous challenges into clear, actionable steps for security, product, and engineering teams.

Strategic Execution

While I am deeply technical, my core value is bridging the gap between writing code and achieving business goals. I work closely with executive teams to build products from the ground up.

• Strategic Alignment: I proactively refine product backlogs, advocate for scalable architectures (using patterns like DDD, SOLID, and TDD), and make sure every technical decision supports the company’s high-level goals.
• Risk & Reliability: I focus on spotting and reducing organizational risks, solving high-impact problems, and introducing processes that keep our platforms stable as they grow.

From “Webmaster” to Platform Engineering

When I started about 18 years ago, the lines between frontend, backend, and infrastructure didn’t exist. Back then, “end-to-end” meant handling everything: talking to clients, designing layouts in Photoshop, writing the backend and database, and finally hosting and maintaining the application.

Over the years, as the industry evolved, so did I. I moved deeply into backend development and Software Architecture, where I started leading technical teams and designing new projects. When I moved to the Netherlands 8 years ago, my focus shifted toward the entire deployment lifecycle. Today, I work primarily in Platform Engineering and Site Reliability (SRE), but my roots allow me to understand every layer of the applications my teams build.

Technical Foundation (The T-Shaped Skill Set)

Because of my background, my technical foundation is broad, but I go deep when it comes to architecture, backend, and infrastructure. I learn how things work under the hood—years ago, I even rewrote my own version of jQuery just to understand its core mechanics.

Today, my technical stack focuses on modern, scalable tools:

• Backend & Architecture: Go is my go-to language for enterprise projects because its built-in libraries make systems highly maintainable. For personal projects, I prefer Rust for its memory safety and developer experience. I also have deep historical experience architecting platforms in PHP (Symfony/Laravel) and Node.js.
• Infrastructure & SRE: I automate the entire CI/CD lifecycle. I transitioned from older tools like Ansible and Jenkins to modern GitOps workflows using GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Terraform/OpenTofu, and Kubernetes.
• Frontend & Beyond: I currently build with Vite + ReactJS or NextJS, but my curiosity often takes me outside standard web development. I’ve built mobile and desktop apps using Expo and Tauri, and I even develop games in Godot as a hobby.

The Unconventional Path

I dropped out of high school to focus entirely on learning how to build for the internet. I am self-taught in a strictly practical way, driven not by a formal degree, but by relentless curiosity and a sharp focus on what actually works in production. This hands-on, results-oriented approach has been the foundation of my 18-year career in tech.

Looking Ahead

For me, growing as a technical leader means constantly finding better ways to solve problems and support my teams. Today, a big part of that growth involves exploring the modern era of AI.

I don’t just read about new trends; I build with them to see what is actually useful. Recently, I built an AI Agent from scratch using only local models (Ollama) to understand the mechanics under the hood and figure out which tasks smaller models can handle to save companies money on LLM costs. I test everything as a hobby, and when a tool proves its value—whether it’s a new DevOps framework or an AI workflow—I bring it to the corporate level.

If you want to connect about scaling systems, engineering leadership, or building products that matter, let’s talk.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn, check out my code on GitHub, or random thoughts on X (formerly Twitter).